Month: January 2018

January finally brought snow also to Southern Finland and darkness is retreating slowly when the day becomes longer. This time monthly notes tells you about different JavaScript frameworks, making webpack perform better and looks into bootstrapping microservices and running docker securely. On programming side there are articles for best practices with Kotlin and about Kotlin stdlib. If you haven’t stumbled upon Kotlin, it’s good to check it out as it’s a nice language for building services targeting the Java Virtual Machine.

Kotlin

Idiomatic Kotlin. Best Practices.
“In order to take full advantage of Kotlin, we have to revisit some best practices we got used to in Java. Many of them can be replaced with better alternatives that are provided by Kotlin.”

Make your life easier with Kotlin stdlib
“Kotlin is not about big killer features but about a bunch of small improvements that have deep impact. Most of them are not built-in into the language, but are functions offered as part of the Kotlin standard library.” The post goes through a limited set of them, and describes how they can be used to improve the code.

Something different

The best science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels of 2017
The Verge lists great books of 2017 in science fiction, fantasy, and horror category which shined a light in the darkness. You newer know if a book is interesting by reading it’s description but these took my eye: Meg Howrey’s The Wanderers, Kameron Hurley’s The Stars are Legion, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Zachary Mason’s Void Star, Joe M. McDermott’s The Fortress at the End of Time, Ian McDonald Luna: New Moon and Linda Nagata’s The Last Good Man.

It’s January 2018 and while I’m gathering my notes for the year’s first post its’ good to look back what I wrote in 2017 and make plans for the new year. In 2017 I managed to write as leisurely as usual and put together 17 articles of which 6 are something other than monthly notes. On average I wrote 1.4 post per month. I visited some meetups, did software development and tested technology stuff. Business as usual and I presume that it’s going to continue this way also this year.

Monthly notes

Writing Monthly notes series about interesting articles I’ve come across has proved to be good way to ensure that I keep reading what happens in software development and also think about it. Collecting articles to monthly post have worked better than publishing weekly. In July I was mostly mountain biking and away from the computer so there was no Monthly notes.

Meetups

Meetup scene in Helsinki has grown and there are several interesting events you can attend almost monthly. But that said, it’s also starting to get growded and events with good topics tend to fill up quickly. I usually find myself going to events to hear war stories of Amazon Web Services, Docker, DevOps, Frontend and Mobile. It’s useful to hear how other’s do things and get new ideas. Meetups and conferences are also nice way to both freshen your thinking and get to know people working in the same field.

In Nebula Tech Thursday – Beer & DevOps we heard stories about “Cloud Analytics – Providing Insight on Application Health and Performance” and “Building a Full Devops Pipeline with Open Source Tools”. OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting #31 presented topics like “DevSec – Developers are the key to security”, “Docker Security” and “Leaking credentials – a security malpractice more common than expected”. Both events where nice and as usual Nebula Tech Thursday with great food and drinks. If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I went to more meetups than I wrote about, like Solita Core and Slush.D.

For making software development more reliable I introduced git pre-commit and pre-receive hooks for validating YAML to our continuous integration process. Validating YAML can be done by using a yamllint and hooking it to pre-commit or pre-receive helps you to automate the check for syntax validity, for weirdnesses like key repetition and cosmetic problems such as lines length, trailing spaces and indentation.

Other things

As an engineer I’m interested of technology and gadgets and sometimes I get things to test. In July I wrote about keeping data secured with iStorage datAshur Personal2 USB flash drive. It is an USB flash drive with combination of hardware encryption, physical keypad and tamper-proofing. Small external devices are easy to lose and can leave your data vulnerable if not encrypted. The hardware encrypted USB flash drive seemed to be quite crafty.

Awesome times ahead

New year, old me. Or something like that. Plans are to continue as before, write about technology, collect interesting articles, learn new things about software development and of course ride mountain bike. The training for the Enduro racing season has already started.